Weekly WiT (7/12/17): Pam Murphy, Infor Inc.

Woman in Tech of the Week (7/12/17)

Pam Murphy, Chief Operating Officer, Infor Inc.

The gender gap in information technology is an open case, with a range of researchers offering variousexplanations for the unequal numbers of men and women in the field. Perhaps one way to gauge how the small number of women in tech wound up there and what the industry might learn from them is to listen to their personal stories.

Reporting from the trenches is Infor Inc.’s Chief Operating Officer Pam Murphy. “I never meant to end up in this industry, so I look back and think, ‘How on earth did I actually get here?’” she said during an interview at this week’s Inforum event in New York.

But get there she did, and as Murphy rose through the Infor organization, others began to turn to her for leadership. Roughly five years ago, Murphy responded by creating Women’s Infor Network, a forum for women at all levels of the company. WIN gives women at Infor an environment in which to swap stories about challenges they’ve faced working in technology and how they overcame them or continue to grapple with them.

The network metastasized globally in just a few years. “We’ve got hundreds of WIN chapters around the globe with thousands of women participating,” Murphy told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.